A Festival Full Day

Busy is good.  Exhausting, yes.  It keeps blog posts from happening until days after events take place, yes.  But I would always rather be busy than not. However, after a weekend as busy as this one was, a recoop is in order. Today I have decided to stay home for the sole purpose of writing this post and pajama snuggles with my sweet boys.

The Great Cloth Diaper Change was fantastic, as was the Earth Day Festival at which it took place.  We are still waiting for the overall numbers to come back for the world record, but the Little Rock location had 45 babies changed.  There was something really awesome about being surrounded by like-minded parents.
I wasn't taking photos considering I was changing a diaper, but Espresso Love Photography was covering the event and they've given me permission to share a couple of photos here (there are many more photos available on Espresso Love Photography's Facebook page).  This was the moment they said "Go!", we all held up our diapers then started the change.

I love calling myself part of this kind of community.

Also, there was a bit on the news with Rebecca, the precious owner of Natural Bambino, advocating cloth and the record setting.  Check it out here.

Since you already know how much I love earth day and festivals in general, I'll just show you some photos of why...

My score from the silent auction, some goodies from Crow Mountain Crafts. She's a local etsy seller (based out of Russelville) providing lots of deliciously scented soaps for all and wool care products for cloth diapering. 

I got to chat with some folks from The People Tree. They are working towards a goal of enriching our community and building a local food system. One project is the Argenta Veggie Garden, where you can rent a plot to grow your own produce.  It costs $15-$25 a year which includes water, straw & access to gardening tools.  Super cool. 

The People Tree's nifty little give-away, a "flower bomb".  It is a ball of fertilizer and wildflower seeds to throw anywhere that could use "a little life".  Love. 

Can't wait to go visit this place for lunch. Looking at their website is almost enough to make me break my plan to stay in pajamas all day. A menu full of locally sourced food?  Yes, please. 

Of course, I had to visit with the homebirth midwives from Birth Works.  

Mustard Seed Church from Conway came out with a really cool way for outreach.  Tobias and I stopped and chatted with them for a moment, all while planting a basil seedling in a planter repurposed from old fence pickets. What an awesome way to advocate caring for the earth and also sharing His love!

Yummyness from the Homegrown Food Truck. 

The girls from G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Rolling In The South) Roller Derby had a booth selling the best homemade jam ever.  I brought home a jar of strawberry (made from some delicious local berries like I blogged about a few days ago) on Saturday, and it's already halfway gone.  I'm going to have to contact them to purchase more because when it runs out, my household might just weep in mourning. 

From the Earth Day Festival, we headed over to show our support at Little Rock Etsy's 2nd Annual Indie Arts and Music Festival.  The weather was perfect and there was facepainting, food, and lovely crafts by sellers like Mindy's In-Stitches, Bearhunt, and The Little Chick.

My beautiful childhood friends Lindsay and Brandi of The Pigeons etsy shop had their booth of of fabulous vintage clothing and handmade accessories.  All their planning and hard work to make the festival happen really paid off, it was so lovely. 

Can you believe at the end of this post, I wish I had taken more photos?  I suppose that's why I love festivals so much, there is just so much to take in and so many interesting people to meet.
I have more from the weekend to share but that will have to be another day.  Pajama snuggles are going to have to take priority for now!

Grow.

Few places in the world inspire me as dangerously as garden nurseries.  The reality of my actual skill level is irrelevant here.  Somehow it is magically washed away at the door and I feel as though anything is possible. 

There have been more than a couple of occasions that I wandered into a garden center and wandered out with considerably less money and a lot of planting to do. 

The problem with me and gardening is that I love it, but I am not a green thumbed person. My mother can grow anything.  Seriously. Anything.  Last summer, she had banana trees bearing fruit in Arkansas.  She carted the huge monster plants from patio to living room during the cold months for a good few years, endured us picking on her for the way her house looked like a jungle in the winter and then stunned us all when they actually started making bananas. In Arkansas!  When she approaches the clearance plant rack of a garden center, it's like you can almost hear the little plants rejoicing that their savior has come at last.  

I, on the other hand, did not inherit this talent.  I love plants and appreciate them.  But let's just say, when I approach the clearance rack the plants droop a little more and know that I'm carting them off to hospice, aka my house, where they will surely die. 

Despite this unfortunate fact, I keep buying plants every year and learning what I can.  I can grow basil now.   And hostas. And pothos (except I don't think pothos counts, I think my dog could grow pothos.)  And I had a good long run with a Peace Lily I affectionately called Hubert, but he succumbed after a forgetful night left out in a freak late freeze. I haven't yet succeeded in keeping a hydrangea or an orchid alive but I've got goals and one of these days I'll see one to maturity.  You'll see. 

This has been a busy spring with Tobias joining our family, so though I've been anxious to go plant shopping,  today was my first trip to the nursery.  We will soon be undertaking "Operation Ugly Beds and Empty Pots" so I was mostly gathering ideas.  Plus, it's just fun to look at all the lovely things. 

Though I may not be a natural born gardener, I am quite good at nurturing imaginations.  Here's Asher winding up in his Sonic the hedgehog stance.  

And Jackson with his precious freckles for good measure.

Opening Day

Shopping malls always make me feel plain.   I recently went on the search for some jeans that fit my postpartum bod.  After wiggling into several pairs and surveying less than satisfactory results in the mirror, I left defeated.  I am not a fancy woman. I don't dye my hair and a lot of make up makes me feel like I'm pretending to be someone I'm not. I cannot justify the expense of pedicures. I like shoes that are easy and I lean towards clothes with character rather than style.  These things are generally truths of which I am confident.  However, I feel so out of place in a mall full of expensive, fussy clothes and the people purchasing them that I sometimes get a little deflated.  I forget how different we all are, how we all have different places to feel comfortable.

Farmer's Markets are my place to fit in.  You will not go to the farmer's market and feel frumpy. How can you when you are surrounded by life and talent and wholesome food being handled by the hands that grew it?   I love a farmer's market; they make me feel alive and exactly where I should be.

Yesterday was the opening day of the Certified Arkansas Farmer's Market in Argenta.  "Certified" means that every vendor is selling wares made or grown locally.  I was a bit late arriving due to a soccer game, but I wasn't too late to score some lovely salad greens, cream honey, and a quart of fresh picked strawberries. Buying food in this fashion makes me realize what we lack as a nation is respect and appreciation for our food sources.  Mass production, the pesticides and preservatives that are harming us, and the ability to transport foods across nations and oceans to buy out of season all make it possible to buy a 2 lb. carton of strawberries in February.  But do you appreciate it?  Do you pick up each berry and notice how jewel bright it glows in the sun, how the juice burst forth as soon as your teeth break skin, how there is no way to eat it without closing your eyes?  Or do you just let the last few tasteless berries mold in the fridge before remorselessly tossing them in the bin?

Something about a farmer's market commands respect for it's wares.  Every table is carefully lined with jars and produce, the people who created them full of knowledge and able to answer questions with ease about their products.  Each item purchased represents their hard work.

One more addition and I'll leave you for the day.  I just have to visually elaborate my point.  Jeremiah and I were putting together a fruit pizza for a church potluck this afternoon and polished off the last of the fresh picked berries from yesterday's market.  To finish the recipe, I pulled out the remainder of a carton of conventional strawberries I'd grabbed at the commissary this week.  I can only describe the difference in the taste between real food and mass produced food. The difference is huge but my descriptions are largely ineffective. It's really one of those things that you can only truly understand by comparing them yourself.  I do wish I could hand every one of you these berries to try because you would become a believer in locally grown, seasonal produce I am sure.

Since I can't do internet wide taste test, however, I'll have to settle for a photo.  Which one would you rather eat?

The Homemade Pantry

Read any good books lately?  I have.

A few days ago, I followed a link and stumbled upon a blog that I knew at once I would love.  Eating From the Ground Up is written by Alana Chernila.  She talks a lot about my favorite things, family and real food.  It just so happened that I found her blog about a week after her first book, The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making , hit the shelves.  On a whim, I purchased it.  

The little brown Amazon box hit my doorstep two days later and I ripped it open like a child on Christmas.  My darling husband looked on skeptically but at this point he is used to such excitement over things like new cookbooks.  By noon the next day, I'd devoured the book cover to cover.  Now I love a good read and I love a good cookbook, but most of all, I love an instance where the two come together to make something completely wonderful.  Alana's book is filled with delicious recipes and beautiful photography woven together on a rich tapestry of family life.

The title pretty much sums up the recipe content of the book.  Learn to make everything from mayonnaise to fruit roll-ups to pasta and soups.  What normally might come across as intimidating endeavors become downright achievable with Alana's blurbs about "tense moments" (you know, those times when cooking that you aren't sure everything is going to plan) and instructions on storing the foods for later use. 

Each recipe is introduced with a personal story, just a paragraph or two from Alana with some sort of relation to the food at hand.  Within the first 10 pages of the book, I was hooked.  I was reduced to laughter at the idea of leaving out a bowl of dry cereal for the early rising two year old (haven't we all tried something like this?).  I was wooed by the idea of a wedding reception full of lovingly made lasagnas.  I related completely to the idea of cornbread as safety and mac and cheese as consolation for loss. 

Usually when I obtain a new cookbook, the first thing I do is go through and dog ear the pages of the things I must try right away.  There are no dog eared pages in my new copy of The Homemade Pantry.  No, I fully intend on properly abusing it the way a well-loved cookbook should be abused.  I've already broken the spine so it would lay flat while I made Car Snacks last night, but I want to cook it all.  I couldn't just pick a few pages.  It really is that good. 

If you fancy yourself a homemaker, give this book a read.  If you are anything like me, you'll find yourself enchanted by the idea of a homemade pantry and bolstered enough to get in the kitchen and make it happen.  As Alana says, in order to become the kind of person who makes butter, all you have to do is start making butter!